Uses for flash disk reader?

[adsmith]

My new laptop has a supported and functioning CompactFlash card reader built in. I also have a couple extra CF cards around, anywhere between 16M and 512M.

Any suggested uses for such a device?

I've almost conviced that it's really useless in the end, but here were some ideas:

1) Use something like the "pam_usb" module -- I.e., plug in the card to login, unplug to lock screen.
2) Keep ssh and gnupg key on it ... but is this more or less secure than the laptop itself??
3) put /lib, /bin, /boot on it... will this maybe speedup boots, or is it not actually any faster for reads? I'll have to do some read benchmarks....
4) If I can find a big enough CF card for cheap, just put /usr/bin and /usr/lib on it.

The main goal would be to use this device in such a way that either makes it faster to do common tasks or to keep the harddrive spun down.

Obviously, we don't want to write to the device too much and trash its lifespan.

[adsmith]

Another thought is to use it for logs on the laptop, since that's usually what most frequently spins up the disk.


any other ideas?

[Abraxa]

To me it seems it would make the most sense where the harddisk's seek times play a big role - I'm not sure where that would be the case, though... maybe portage syncs but that's about it?

Using it for /boot might be an interesting idea however your laptop would have to be able to boot from it - can it?

I wouldn't use it for log files, though, since the high number of write operations will probably wear out the memory rather quickly.

Maybe putting /lib and /usr/lib on there might make sense because libraries only need to be read most of the time and should provide increased I/O throughput when loading applications - in comparison to loading both the app and the libs from disk, that is.

Greetings,
-Soeren